Facebook may be exploding with its promise of fun, but people need professional presence, too

■ BY IRINA SLUTSKY islutsky@adage.com

NO MATTER HOW successful andmonopolistic Facebook gets, no matterhow many awesome features MarkZuckerberg announces in Palo Alto orhow many ex-presidents he inter-views, none of it appears to be slowingdown LinkedIn, the social network thatdoesn’t want to be known as a socialnetwork—the one that’s about having,getting and keeping a job.

2003, LinkedIn membership is up to 85
million, meaning that Facebook seems
less and less likely to turn LinkedIn into
Friendster, MySpace or Orkut. In fact,
LinkedIn has nearly doubled its
employee count, going from 500 in
January to 900 by the end of this year.

So how does the social network fit
into an ecosystem increasingly owned
by Facebook? “The arrival of Facebook

HEAD COUNT:

employees by the
end of the year,
nearly doubling its
staff size from
January

has made LinkedIn ever more important,” said David Berkowitz, senior
director at 360i, adding that Facebook
can never replace LinkedIn because the
two are diametrically opposed in terms
of their raison d’être. “From early on,
LinkedIn was very professional—had a
polish that felt safe for business, and

MEGHAN MYSZKOWSKI was scanning
the grocery wine aisle on a recent day
when one bottle seemed to jump out
at her.

“I liked the label,” the 30-year-oldLos Angeles resident said, recalling herpurchase of Layer Cake Primitivo. “It’sreally clean. It’s really modern and it’snot super-traditional. It doesn’t have achateau on it. It has a cake.”Ms. Myszkowski is the new winebuyer—one of 70 million millennialswhose taste for adventure, quirkinessand convenience will drive the marketin the coming decade. The generation,loosely defined as those born between1980 and 2000, is taking up wine at anearlier age than Gen X-ers and theywill buy wine just about anywhere—including the corner convenience store.And 20 million of them have yet toturn 21, meaning they will become aneven more powerful force.

Yet wine marketers have only
recently started zeroing in on the market, as opposed to other lifestyle brands
which have been tracking the generation for many years, said one expert.
“They only start paying attention to us
once we turn 21, so unfortunately they
are now kind of behind the curve in
terms of the research they’ve been
doing,” said Leah Hennessy, 30, who
runs a blog called millennier.com that
focuses on wine and millennials. ”Now
everybody is playing catch-up.”

millennials whose
taste for adventure,
quirkiness and
convenience will
drive the market in
the coming decade
of millennials
prefer wine over
other alcoholic
beverages
in table-wine sales,
up nearly 5%

The most recent player is 7-Eleven,
which convened a focus group of millennials before launching its latest line
of proprietary wines about two weeks
ago. The brand, called Cherrywood
Cellars, is priced at $7.99 to $8.99 to
lure young adult drinkers whom the
convenience store chain says might be
watching their wallets more closely
than Gen X-ers and baby boomers during the economic downturn.

“We are targeting millennials
because they like convenience and to
try new products,” Jesus Delgado-Jenkins, 7-Eleven’s senior VP-mer-chandising and logistics, said in a statement.

Although beer remains the beverage of choice for millennials, accounting
for 42% of their alcoholic drinks, wine
captures 20%—up from 13% for Gen
Xers when they were a similar age 10

years ago, according to Nielsen.
Drinkers tend to shift to spirits and
wine as they get older. If that trend
holds, wine will account for 26% of all
alcoholic drinks consumed by all U.S.
generations in 10 years, up from 24%
today, while beer will fall from 41% to
38%, according to Nielsen.

“The millennial generation offers
the wine industry the kind of growth
potential not seen in more than 30
years,” noted the Wine Market Council
in its 2009 consumer tracking study.

The last great wine boom peaked in
the 1980s as baby boomers matured,
but then sales slid, partly because Gen
X-ers were initially hesitant to take up
wine, according to the council. Sales
have grown slowly but steadily since
the mid-‘90s. Table wine sales were up
nearly 5% to $6.1 billion in the year
ending Oct. 31, according to
SymphonyIRI, which does not include
Walmart and liquor stores.

The test for marketers is to gain loyalty from young drinkers whose tastes
are only now emerging. For some wine
companies, that means putting members of the generation in charge of their
brands. At Treasury Wine Estates in
Napa, for instance, 26-year-old Jenna
Hudson is a member of team of 20- and
30-somethings planning the national
launch early next year of
Sledgehammer, which is targeting the
male millennial market.

Marketed as a “no-fuss” wine, the
brand “eschews really traditional wine
speak” like “this smells of cherries and
berries and that type of thing,” Ms.
Hudson said. But the wine will also
seek to subtly educate the new generation of wine drinkers, possibly using
booklets of wine facts presented in a
way that’s “funny and sarcastic,” she
said.

Experts say millennials, as opposed
to other generations, have no fear of
asking for wine advice, but a lot of them
seek it from Facebook friends and on
Twitter—which is leading winemakers
to invest in social media. At Jackson